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About Thinkbig

Thinkbig lab has become the blog of Thinkbig Factoryand Openarch project. By now Ion Cuervas-Mons is the writer of all posts but there will be new writers soon. The areas we are interested in are architecture, cities, strategic design, advanced tecnologies, design thinking, smart cities, internet of things, user experience and interaction design.

Thinkbig Factory is an architecture and design consultancy that creates opportunities between digital and physical realities helping organizations to grow and innovate.

The following text is the transcript of a presentation prepared for the first day of a workshop at Matadero. In collaboration with PKMN, we developed a series of activities during 5 working days (2 hours per day) to end up doing a theatre performance about telecommuting:

I am going to try to put a framework on which to develop this collective creative process; in order to do it in a correct way, it is necessary to establish a common set of principles. It is like the attitude with which to face the process.

CO-DESIGN.

We will all participate in the process. Creativity is not a gift but the ability to listen to ideas and articulate them through our experience. We do not have to give importance to the authorship of ideas; the good point is when we reach the moment in which we are incapable of knowing about it. We must build on the ideas of others, what is important is not the ideas themselves but what we develop through them.
FUN. In order for this to work, it must be fun. The key is to live the moment, working on each activity without thinking about the final result. Everything is good enough and you have to let it go, the more irrelevant and stupid what we propose or write on a post it, will be better. We must have an experimental attitude and take risks constantly.

DIVERGENCE / CONVERGENCE.

This outline is the simplification of a creative process. It never happens in this linear way but it is useful to express what we want to focus on. The standard processes of problem solving are based on choosing a series of inputs, analysing them and then converging to find a single solution. We will focus on the divergent phase, in the moment when the ideas are generated. As Peter Cook said in his lecture about education for architecture in the IE in Segovia: The really valuable thing is to educate in the lateral thinking. It is the phase where quantity is more important than quality, we are interested in experimenting the process for this phase to work almost unconsciously. Quantity. When we approach the end, we will try converge and value what can work. In order to do that, we are creating this slate and a tumbler to save what we can use in the final phase, which will be better explained in the operation.

USER / PARTICIPANT.

Focusing the project’s strategy on the user is the best way to have a common approach to the process. It is like a language for the process. In this case, the participant is the one who turns up on Friday to take part in the end of year’s performance; we must walk in someone else’s shoes and focus on this person’s fun. We are creating a live topological diagram about teleworking, we need them to have fun and turn from spectator into participant. At midweek, we can even propose an activity about defining specifically 2 or 3 users and try to see, from their own perspective, if what we have done is working properly.

LEARNING BY DOING.

In my opinion, it is the only way. As it is stated in the constructivist pedagogy: people learn through the interactions between the subject and the object. Knowledge is connected to the structure of the action, to the doing. It is the way to activate an actual process of collective creation, the fact of having something on your hands constantly allows you to interact. That is why we established a series of activities along the workshop, which will be better explained while analyzing in the next phase.

PROTOTYPES AND THINKING VISUALLY.

Build in order to think. We will bring material so as to make rapid prototypes of the ideas as they arise, they must be seedy and have failures to make people stimulate creativity. It is the best way to communicate and get others participate in the ideas. The same happens with visualizations, use every situation to draw anywhere and tell the ideas you are working on to the others.

INNOVATE.

All this process is not to implement a performance like the one we showed you in the video, but to create an actual innovation from this starting point. We have to develop it and try to do something better and more fun. Think in innovative aspects and leave the logistics at the end.

And, of course, you can question anything about all this process, since it is completely open to you and we must be actively creative with it.

It has been six months of hard work, generating many ideas and understanding the opportunities that emerging technologies are opening up for Tesco. We have identified customer trends and we are starting to form prototypes of some products. Tesco is at the forefront of innovation within retail. This project is highly confidential, so at this [...]